Insurance deals with its clients about 160 million times a year. All these, then, are the occasions in which a conflict can arise between the client and the insurer. For this and other reasons, in all developed financial markets, and the market is one of them, insurance claim processes are highly developed in law and in practice.

All insurers have a customer service instance to which they can address claims and must also meet a maximum response time. But if everything fails between insurer and client, the insurance supervisor, the General Directorate of Insurance and Pension Funds (DGSFP), has a Claims Service that you can go to. It is, therefore, a service that exists for you as a Costco auto insurance customer. But it is good that you are clear in what conditions.

The conditions to be able to access the DGSFP Complaints Service are few, quite simple; but today we want to talk about one in particular: the condition, established by law, that before going to the DGSFP, you must have complained to your insurer and received from it a response that you do not like, does not work for you or does not you consider appropriate.

In 2019, according to its own data, the DGSFP Claims Service resolved 10,271 files corresponding to requests filed by insurance customers, beneficiaries, or injured third parties. The figure we want to highlight is that, of these files, one in three was not admitted by the Service. And in its Claims Report, the DGSFP tells us that “the first cause (of non-admission), by numerical importance, is not having previously gone to the existing conflict resolution instances in the entities against which the claim is made.” In other words, one in three claimants “forgets” to claim their own insurer first.

It is important to understand that the regulations establish that the person who has a claim against their insurer must first address their claim to it. That rule has not been put there to delay the process because, as we have told you, the entity, by law, has a very demanding deadline to answer you. Thus, writing to the insurer is not a waste of time. It is a logical procedure since the statistics show that most of the claims are resolved between the entity itself and the client.

To make everything more efficient, then, always remember to claim your entity first. If you don’t, that’s when the process takes longer than it should.

If you want to know more, do not forget to visit the DGSFP space dedicated to information on how to file a claim.